Shoot, Post, and Share: The Viral Accusations against Sisi and the Military that Led to Friday’s Protests

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Sep 22, 2019 Egypt
Shoot, Post, and Share: The Viral Accusations against Sisi and the Military that Led to Friday’s Protests

Shoot, Post, and Share: The Viral Accusations against Sisi and the Military that Led to Friday’s Protests

By : Omar Said and Rana Mamdouh

Something big—that we do not yet fully understand—is happening in the halls of power. Maybe we know some of it, and will get to know more with time. Perhaps we will not learn more at any time in the near future. What we do know is that the build-up to Friday’s protests began with a video of an Egyptian residing abroad, filming himself with a phone in a room overlooking the sea, accusing the country’s rulers of corruption and squandering billions on vanity real estate projects. His name is Mohamed Ali. 

The first video by Ali, a former contractor who also had a brief stint as an actor, stirred the pot. Others soon followed suit, posting similar videos accusing the current authorities of corruption and political mismanagement. No response from the authorities has matched the videos’ intensity or consistency in terms of their form or content. Last week, President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi gave an address at a hastily organized youth conference where he dismissed the accusations as “lies”—marking the only official high-level response to Ali’s claims. This response, however, only provoked even more videos, with more protagonists, more accusations and more people in power implicated in acts of corruption.  

Ali posted the first of his now-viral videos two weeks ago. They contain a number of accusations, outlining specific incidents and directly laying blame on well-known individuals. And despite the controversy sparked by the videos, the authorities did not offer a response, save for a media campaign aimed at tarnishing the contractor’s image that did not refute the substance of his claims. 

The first accusation was made against Major General Kamel al-Wazir, current minister of transportation and former head of the Armed Forces’ Engineering Authority, which oversees a number of major national projects, and Major General Essam al-Kholy, head of the engineering authority’s Major Projects division. The debacle surrounded a luxury hotel for military intelligence in the Choueifat area of New Cairo, which was allegedly shrouded in violations. Ali was the contractor for the project, which he claims cost more than two billion Egyptian pounds. 

He also said that military leaders contracted him to build a presidential villa in Alexandria for Sisi and his family to spend their Eid vacation which cost some 250 million Egyptian pounds.

The former contractor also claims that military leaders decided to build a number of villas in the Heikstep military area, next to a large palace that was intended to be a presidential residence. He went on to say that this project has been replaced with another called “al-Kayan,” which is meant to gather all military leaders in one area. 

He alleges that all economic projects embarked on by the armed forces in cooperation with the private sector are delegated directly, forgoing the normal tender process where projects are awarded to the highest bidder.

By the end of the first week of videos, Ali’s well had seemingly dried up—or maybe that is how he wanted it to appear. He then turned his focus from specific accusations of corruption and waste to a broader political attack against Sisi and the men surrounding him.

At this point, pro-regime TV presenter Amr Adib said that Ali’s videos were becoming “boring.” That might have been the case until Sisi spoke the next day at a quickly organized iteration of the “National Youth Conference,” where he dedicated his appearance to discussing rumors on social media. During the conference, the president decided that open confrontation was the best way to address the accusations. He took the former contractor head-on, despite “warnings from intelligence agencies” not to do so. 

“Are you not afraid for your army? Are you not afraid for your young officers that are hearing talks of their leaders being bad people? Do you not know the army? The army is a closed institution (applause), no really, the army is a closed institution that is very, very, very sensitive to any inappropriate behavior. Especially if it is being said that the leaders are involved in this inappropriate behavior,” Sisi said.

He added: “All the intelligence agencies told me please do not talk about it. All the agencies … You know, I will tell you something; they kissed my hand, saying please do not do this [they said]. I told them, what is between me and the people is trust. The people believe me. When someone tries to break that and tells them that this person you trust is not a good person. This is the most dangerous thing in the world. This is the most dangerous thing in the world.”

But Sisi’s mesh of endearing and threatening discourse might have only given his opponents a leg up. Just a few hours after the conference concluded, Ali posted two hours’ worth of new clips, which were more of an open political confrontation. The videos begin with stories pertaining to the president’s son, Mahmoud, and the state’s counter-insurgency campaign in North Sinai. There was also a topical shift in Ali’s videos, from the personal account of a contractor who worked with the government to that of a political opponent speaking his mind to his audience. This is when Mosaad Abu Fagr, a long-time Sinai activist, now based abroad, appeared with an even more drastic list of accusations. 

Abu Fagr kept the train of accusations rolling and even amplified it. He appeared to be knowledgeable of the topics he discussed and reinforced his accounts by claiming to have attended meetings with the General Intelligence Service. He delved deeper into topics generally considered off-limits and led the way for even more videos detailing political mismanagement, financial corruption, and one-man rule. 

He released two videos a few days apart. In the first video, he claims that the state declined an offer made by North Sinai’s tribal leaders to rid Sinai of terrorist cells within a few weeks. Abu Fagr said that he was asked by the same tribal leaders to make this information public. 

Abu Fagr also claims that the president has sought help from drug smugglers and dealers with criminal records instead of cooperating with the tribes. He also says that the president and his son, Mahmoud, have an economic stake in the business of smuggling goods from Sinai to the Gaza strip. 

In the other video, Abu Fagr speaks about the armed forces’ wiping out of entire villages along the Egypt-Gaza border, which he describes as a “direct confrontation to the people of Sinai, with the purpose of serving the so-called ‘deal of the century’.” 

And then more videos kept coming out and spread throughout social media. One popular video posted by Ahmed Sarhan, a former army officer and lawyer, has received over half a million views. 

Sarhan’s video was posted a few days after Ali’s accusations began to spread, particularly in response to the news that lawyer Mohamed Hamdy Younes, who said he would officially request the attorney general to investigate Ali’s claims, was arrested and charged by the State Security Prosecution with belonging to a terrorist organization. In the video, Sarhan backs up most claims made by Ali and asks for Younes’ release, before making further accusations against the president’s inner circle, especially Wazir.

And then videos of individuals claiming to be former army and intelligence officers started coming out. In one such video, a masked individual notes date on which he recorded the video before backing Ali’s assertions and claiming that he possesses sensitive information that puts him in a position to ask Sisi to step down. 

He explains that Ali’s account of “factual information about the corruption in the upper ranks of the armed forces,” as well as people’s sympathy towards Ali, have caused some state entities to reach out to the latter. He alleges that the events happening are actually an act of “retaliation” by the General Intelligence Service against Military Intelligence over the forced retirement of ninety-five officers from the General Intelligence Service, amongst other reasons. The two security bodies, in addition to the National Security Agency, are the three main intelligence entities in Egypt. Sisi hails from military intelligence, which he directed until he was appointed defense minister and commander of the armed forces in 2012. 

The masked army officer’s video was followed by a video of another masked individual who claimed to be an intelligence officer. He claimed that Sisi is trying to change those in command at a rapid pace so that their tenure is not long enough not to allow them to accrue significant power within the armed forces. He also claimed that the official spokesperson for the Israeli army had tweeted (without specifying the date of the tweet) warning Sisi about a coup. According to the masked man, less than forty-eight hours later, Sisi reshuffled the commanding ranks of the military. Last year, Sisi replaced the head of the General Intelligence Service Khaled Fawzy with Abbas Kamel, a close associate of the president. In 2017, he removed Mahmoud Hegazy, his military chief of staff, and replaced him with Mohamed Farid Higazy. 

The masked man in the video says: “Sisi runs the intelligence from his presidential office and sends all agency reports to Israel. This is evidenced by the fact that the entire region is being arranged for the benefit of Israel, both politically and militarily. Egypt is now losing its authority over the Red Sea and oil wells, and is losing its ability to bypass water obstacles, and is also losing the Nile.” 

Unlike the two armed forces officers who made efforts to stay anonymous throughout their videos, another video surfaced of a former armed forces’ pilot named Hany Sharaf who appears unmasked. In his video, Sharaf appeared to answer questions from another individual in the room, who remained unidentified. In the video, Sharaf said, “If you get any military man who just graduated they can tell you that giving up Tiran and Sanafir was not done to benefit Saudi Arabia, but rather in Israel’s interest in removing Egypt’s authority over the waterways.” In a contested 2016 agreement, Egypt ceded two of its Red Sea islands to Saudi Arabia, stirring opposition from several parties, including some judicial institutions. 

Then, Hesham Sabry, who identified himself as a former state security officer, published a video in which he says that Ali’s coming forward encouraged him to talk because they reassured him that “the obvious things said by Ali, which are ninety percent true, have shocked the people of Egypt.” He went on to say that Sisi controls all aspects of the state, adding that “we will never get rid of him, he will stay with is but it is important for him to know that there is an opposition.” 

Activist Wael Ghoneim, who is closely associated with the 2011 protests, also shared videos from the United States where he resides. Several days later, his family in Cairo announced on Facebook that their house was raided and Ghoneim’s brother Hazem was arrested. 

Ghoneim’s videos struck a similar note to the others, especially regarding the role of Sisi’s son in managing the daily politics of the state. He says that the latter personally contacted him about the use of social media accounts to sway public opinion. 

And so, Ali spoke, Sisi answered, then others spoke. Now even more people who do not necessarily have secrets to tell are commenting.

One of the most popular video responses to the accusations was posted by Sherif Faranca on his fitness and zumba dancing-focused Facebook page. The video now has over 2.5 million views.

“You are complaining that people are sharing [the videos on social media]. Did you ask yourself why people are sharing? I will tell you. First of all, because we have a one-sided media. This means that the only way people can let off steam is through social media. The media does not reflect people’s problems so people take to social media,” Faranca says in the video. 

“Now we come to the presidential palaces. I will not dwell on the small things, but believe me this hurt all of us. We are all barely getting by. We are a mess. So, when we hear about the presidential palaces you are building and your answer is ‘I will still build more’ … Who said that modern states are judged by their ability to build luxurious presidential palaces? You know more than I do. Why are they being built? Even if they are not for you, these serve one individual and we have so many people that we need to serve. So tell me, why are they being built? Why are you provoking us?” he says. 

“Your answers were not at the level we were expecting. This is not about Mohamed [Ali], he just raised suspicions. The response [to the accusations] needed to be objective and clear. Is there actual corruption? What about the army generals he talked about? Are they what he says they are? Are there actually that many presidential palaces? If he is a liar, tell us that he is a liar upfront and with proof.” 

The regime tried to keep up with the influx of videos with its regular media attacks against the video makers from its most prominent mouthpieces like Ahmed Moussa and Nashaat al-Dihy. Then, videos spread online of famous actors and singers including Hamo Bika, Shaaban Abdel Reheem, and Mohamed Lotfy offering their support to the president.

Then, MP Mahmoud Badr, a figure once close to the opposition who led the Tamarod campaign that spearheaded a petition campaign to oust former president Mohamed Morsi in 2013, also posted a video on Twitter. He starts off by recounting his history as a member of the opposition during the 30 June period. More than half of Badr’s video is made up of him saying things such as “I will not talk about treason” and “I will not talk about this.” The other half warns of the dangers of a war on the state and “calls to take down the Egyptian army.”

But nothing has yet to stop the deluge of videos. 

[This article was originally posted on Mada Masr on 21 September 2019.]
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Jul 9, 2013 Lebanon
Zeynep Gambetti By :
Zeynep Gambetti

Occupy Gezi as Politics of the Body

Since the Gezi resistance started with bloodshed on 31 May, it has had an “anti-depressant” effect, as a friend of mine puts it, as much as it has been nerve-racking. During this period where each day has been prone to new crises and normalcy was completely disrupted, we simultaneously experienced the peaks of ecstasy and the depths of sorrow.

Analyzing such an intense event naturally requires taking some distance. Pending systematization, however, the vivid memory of each day impels one to put on paper multifarious ideas that resonate well with the resistance. Each morning, many bodies with sleep deprived eyes wake up in Istanbul, Ankara, Antakya, Urfa, and Denizli to take to the streets once again, after having quickly checked the latest news in the social media. They are astonished and impressed that they can still walk, run, stand up, and carry provisions for those in the parks. Exhausted bodies rejuvenate with every new threat that the government utters, and with thousands, tens of thousands of others they begin flowing to Taksim, Kızılay, Kuğulu Park, Gündoğdu, Abbasoğlu, and Yeniköy Park carrying home-made gas masks, swimmer goggles, anti-acid solutions, and whistles.

No one does or can govern these bodies. The masses that gather in public spaces are not formed by virtue of transferring tax money into the wallets of partisans. No one provides shuttle buses for them; no one gives them flags, or feeds them with sandwiches. No one assigns them the slogans they shout out during the demonstrations. Bodies that take heart from knowing that they are not alone do not count, or count on, numbers to meet with others in communal or virtual spaces. One standing man suffices for thousands of others to take to the streets. After all, “one” is also a number…

The government, whose tactlessness prompts these resisting and standing bodies to convene again and again every single day, could not have missed the significance of this body politics. These bodies naturally do have a language, even a few languages that are at times congruent and at others incongruent; however, as a whole, they constitute a politics of the body. The rage and dreams that have been embodied in tweets and graffiti since 31 May turn into material realities through the physical existence, visibility, and endurance of the bodies. If history is being rewritten, then its subject is the body.

Four of these bodies lost their lives during this war that the government has waged on society. Thousands of bodies have been beaten up: some lost their eyes, some received irretrievable injuries. Skins were burnt under the water from the cannons, “laced” with chemicals for maximum harm; lungs were choked with tear gas. Pounded arms, legs, and heads got crushed and broken. The long-term effects of the tons of chemicals dumped on bodies are still unknown. What is known, however, is that these chemicals killed hundreds of cats, dogs, and birds, and that they did harm to countless insects, butterflies, and other smaller organisms.

The apparatuses of the state, and the vehicles of death that responded to Gezi’s politics of the body, attempted to imitate the life force that they failed to extort. In response to the huge numbers that filled the parks and squares and astonished everyone without exception, they hoped to gather partisans together in scripted rallies. They began comparing head counts; they calculated representative percentages. When the calculations did not match, they increased the number of police in body armor and helmets and moved them from protest to protest. They built walls of flesh and steel against the wave of resisting flesh. When that did not work, they offered these bodies—which have been in contact with each other physically and virtually through meetings, banners, and tweets—a mise en scène of dialogue, the conditions of which were more or less already determined. They could not even wait for this attempt to yield fruit; two warnings and a command were enough to launch an assault to remove the bodies that produced an alternative sociability from the park, from the space in which physical resistance could be transformed into a life style. They freed the public space of the public. They collected all the banners, pictures, and colors one by one to erase them from social memory. They stripped all the trees, each dedicated to victims of state violence; they appropriated the barricades that were named after tens of people who had undergone physical and psychological torture, and they tore them to tatters. They destroyed the efforts to keep alive the memories of Fikret Encü, who was a victim of Roboski; Metin Göktepe, who was tortured and killed in detention; Dicle Koğacoğlu, who could not take all the sorrow inherent in this society any more; and the Surp Hagop Armenian Cemetery, which was destroyed by Turkish racism.

The only thing that remains is a politics of the body—but the bodies that produce this politics differ from what Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life.” They are not “mere” bodies that the arbitrary will of a sovereign can isolate from society, oppress unceremoniously, or push to the margins of the symbolic world. Rather, they evoke what Ernst Bloch calls “the upright man,” the collective Prometheus. Bloch writes:

Nothing is more fortifying than the call to begin from the beginning. It is youthful as long as it is; to it there belongs a young and aspiring class. It is innocent of the bad things that have happened, for it has never had a real opportunity to be guilty. When this happens, justice has the effect of a morning; it opposes itself to that eternal sickness which was handed down before it. Beginning anew is freshness through and through; it is a first if it appears completely ahistorical, and if it seems to lead back to the beginning of history….It carries the image of the pastoral mood, of the shepherd, of the simple and upright man; one can play with it even in the dark.[1]

Gezi is the struggle of disorderly bodies, those who do not have any dispositif other than their own bodies, against the death machines. If the machines are regulatory instances that follow commands and extort public spaces of mobility with force and violence, then the force they face is the resistance of life itself. Life flourishes at the most unexpected moments and places, just like weeds that crack the concrete and spring out of it. No apparatus of the state can succeed in dominating life absolutely.

The state seeks order; it can control only those whom it orders. It cannot cope with the demand of "freedom"; it has to ask questions such as “freedom for whom,” “freedom for what,” or “freedom under what circumstances” in order to tuck freedom into neat boxes. Order draws borders, fixes identities, and defines. It attempts to establish a hierarchy. By telling parents to take their daughters and sons home from the park, it both brands the resisting bodies as "children" and tries to trigger into action the nucleus of society: family. Through its rhetoric of security, it attributes the risks of its own making to the resisting bodies. It hangs its own flag or banner on the bodies that it prefers knocking down rather than protecting. It punishes those who do not obey; it uses punishment as retaliation. It operates through censorship, threats, and propaganda.

Life, on the other hand, is a constant flux. It challenges borders and moves beyond them. It opens up to circulation those spaces that are closed off due to construction; it paints such destructive vehicles as bulldozers pink; it transforms steps into tribunes, pieces of iron into wish trees, and trees destined to be cut down into monuments. It walks on highways and bridges that are closed to pedestrians. It does not like the empty and the sterile; it covers them up with banners, slogans, tents. It leaves its mark on every surface. It disrupts silence at times with pots and pans, and at other times with a tune from a piano. It plays with identities and definitions; it makes them fluid; it renders them indistinguishable. It can make fun of both itself and the established order thanks to its humor. By changing one single letter in a word, it can ridicule the heaviest of symbolisms. When the state apparatus sends a riot-intervention vehicle to pour tear gas on it, life stops to catch its breath for a while and goes right back to resisting. When a body grows tired, it gets replaced by a reinvigorated one. Life turns into thousands of fingers that tweet and take photographs when the state apparatus sends down vehicles of propaganda. It stops its wheelchair to grab the flag that fell on the ground while escaping from tear gas. It apologizes when it steps on someone`s foot while running; it calms down those who panic.

It is obvious that these bodies that fascism wants to militarize will not assume any ideological identity. When they do not drink alcohol, they ridicule conservatism; when they lie under a TOMA, they make fun of liberalism, which claims that life is the most valuable good. Orthodox Marxism cannot decide under which class struggle these "çapulcu" bodies are to be subsumed. As long as they stay in physical contact, as long as they remain as collective Prometheuses, as long as they—have to—continue the resistance, they grow accustomed to each other`s colors, languages, and genders. They disrupt the behavioral rules that ideologies and institutions expect from them. The natural or moral instinct of protection that has been attributed to mothers loses ground when female bodies participate in the resistance alongside their children. The nationalist and the Kurd exchange anti-acid solutions in gas-filled hotel lobbies. The upper-class college kid drinks the water handed over by the kid with an Anonymous mask without needing to ask what neighborhood he’s from. Soccer fans save their curses for the police rather than for their rivals.

What comes out of all this is trust, not chaos. That`s why the bodies multiply with every gush of tear gas, spaces expand with every police attack, and the quality of contact among the bodies increases with every propaganda speech. The life woven together by bodies born in Gezi is so tenacious that the government is right in fearing it. The power of these bodies stems from their capacity to mutualize endurance, rather than vulnerability (as Judith Butler envisioned they would). One would need to look into the extensive interstices of this politics of the body, rather than into macro-level discourses, to begin deciphering it.

NOTES

[1] Ernst Bloch, Natural Right and Human Dignity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 61.

[An earlier version of this article was published on 26 June 2013 on BIA ("Independent Communication Network"). The link to that version can be found here. This article was translated from Turkish by Gülfer Göze.]